The present invention relates to a tablet packing apparatus and, more particularly, to a tablet packing apparatus having a function to cut a tablet into halves for delivering it to a child patient or for the like purpose.
In case that the patient is a child, if one tablet is prescribed for one dose, the dose is too much for the child. Therefore, it has been customary practice to cut the tablet into halves to prescribe one half of the tablet. In such a case, although it is common to manually divide the tablet into two parts, there has been proposed an arrangement such that one tablet is divided into halves by a tablet splitter (as disclosed in Japanese Utility Model Publication No. 6-7715, for example).
With manual cutting, however, there is disadvantages that operating efficiency is very poor, and that it is difficult to split the tablet accurately into halves.
Even when the tablet splitter is used, a tablet having no split line formed on the surface thereof can hardly be split accurately into halves. Furthermore, it is necessary that tablet splitting and subsequent packing must be separately carried out. This involves troublesome work, resulting in poor operating efficiency.